Extras - Searching for Government Information? Shed a Little Northern Light on the Subject

Diana Botluk is a reference librarian at the Judge Kathryn J. DuFour Law Library at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and is the author of the
The Legal List: Research on the Internet. She teaches legal research at CAPCON, Catholic University Law School, and the University of Maryland. Take a class with Diana!
Here's how...

Northern Light

Northern Light is a web
search engine created to address the lack of organization and quality
information provided by other general web search engines. It accomplishes
this in two ways.

Two
Sets of Resources in One

First, a search using Northern Light really searches two subsets of
information simultaneously. It acts as both a general search engine,
resulting in documents gathered from the Internet at large. At the same
time, Northern Light searches through its special collection database for
articles and other documents from over 6,900 magazines, journals, books,
newspapers, pamphlets, and newswires. Most of the special collection
sources date back to 1995; however, some date as far back as 1990. Results
from the web search appear as links to the sites where the information is
located, while results from the special collection search provide
citations to and abstracts of the documents found. The results of both
searches are free, but Northern Light charges a small fee to access the
full text of documents in the special collection.

Customized
Search Folders

The second feature of Northern Light to address the need for
organization and quality is its most unique feature, its organization of
results into customized search folders. Northern Light really provides two
results lists. One lists results by relevancy score, like most search
engines. But the other divides results into similar categories, like pages
from a single domain or a certain type of domain, and organizes them into
easy-to-use custom search folders. These folders are created to match each
unique set of results for each unique search. Thus, they differ from
search to search. Results from both the web and special collection are
fully integrated into both the regular results list and the custom search
folders, except for the one folder that always has only the special
collection material found for each search.

Northern Light launched its search service three years ago, and has
been expanding ever since. Northern Light continues to add more sources to
its special collection, but has also refined its service to assist with
search precision. Researchers can now search specifically for business
information, stock quotes, investment reports, and news articles. Its
latest addition, Geo Search, searches for locations of all sorts,
including business locations, activities and services all over the United
States and Canada. Another useful feature of Northern Light is its alert
service, where an e-mail can alert you to new information based on any
given search.

Usgovsearch

Last year, Northern Light teamed with the National Technical
Information Service to provide a unique search service called Usgovsearch.
Usgovsearch combines a government focused version of the Northern Light
with the NTIS archive of government
information products. Thus, one search at Usgovsearch simultaneously
provides results from three distinct subsets: the NTIS archive, Northern
Light’s special collection, and government web sites. Like Northern
Light, Usgovsearch integrates the results and presents them in both the
relevancy ranked results list and the custom search folders created
specifically for each unique search request. What the researcher sees next
depends on the individual result chosen, and whether it is a web document,
a special collection document, or an NTIS report summary.

For example, let’s say the research issue deals with West Indian
Manatee mortality. You would start at the Usgovsearch home page and search
for west indian manatee mortality through all three subsets of sources.
This search results in 178 items, fully integrated in the results list and
custom folders. Several custom folders are created for this particular
search, including such topics as manatees & dugongs, ecosystems, and
endangered species.

The relevancy ranked results list reveals that the first two most
relevant results are from the web, one from the EPA’s Gulf of Mexico
Aquatic Mortality Network and the other from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service. When you click on either of these results, you are brought
directly to that web page and leave Northern Light, just like any other
search engine.

The third result is from Northern Light’s special collection,
specifically, an article from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. When you click
on this result, you are brought to an abstract of the article, along with
full bibliographic information. The article is a premium document from
Northern Light’s special collection and can be purchased immediately
online. Northern Light offers a couple of different ways to pay for
premium articles. They can either be purchased individually or researchers
can set up either an individual or enterprise account.

Scrolling a little further down the results list reveals a result from
NTIS report summaries, a report from the National Ecology Research Center
in Gainesville, Florida. Clicking on this result provides a couple of
options. Northern Light provides a very brief document abstract simply of
the NTIS report summary, in other words, a summary of the summary. The
full NTIS report summary can be purchased directly from Northern Light on
the spot for a dollar. Beneath the summary is the option to link directly
to NTIS to purchase the text of the document itself. Clicking on the
option to purchase the document from NTIS removes the researcher from
Usgovsearch to an NTIS online shopping cart set up to purchase that full
document. The shopping cart reveals that the full cost of the document is
$123, provides the NTIS order number, and gives the option to purchase the
document. It is important to note that the document must be ordered and is
not available immediately online like the special collection documents.

Both Northern Light and Usgovsearch offer power search forms for even
more precision searching. To use power searching in Usgovsearch, click on
the power search tab from the front page. Here you will see a form that
allows the search to be restricted in several ways. You can search for
words which appear only in the document or publication title. Searches can
also be limited by date and agency, as well as a variety of given topics.

While both government web sites and NTIS reports can be searched in
other ways, Usgovsearch offers the unique combination of allowing both to
be searched at once with Northern Light’s special collection with the
organization of results into useful custom search folders. Thus,
Usgovsearch is an excellent tool for any person seeking government
information on the Internet.